Shelter

Who has time
for sturdy
rooftops,
those days
spilling through
the old kinds of winters,
the chill smoothing
splintered doorframes,
the snow going
to interior corners?
Those days
outside the kitchen windows,
the silvered sun
pressed between
horizon and the low, gray, down
of the sky -
lulling geese
to stay too-long
in ponds -
were meant for
ages walked,
not overflown.

In the end
east pulls itself to west,
and there's no getting by it.

It all makes sense
the way that nothing ever does, or did;
the way the days still pass
beneath feet
numbed cold, soaked and stilled.

Nickels

My sons' eyes always ask
if I have ever
re-carved nickels into gold.

And I have not
In all the light
of knife-tipped lanterns,

Or the wild
of edges
lit beneath
the sea of what shines
out west.

Unfamiliar

Where I am now,
late at night at times
long after last locks,

    the floor shifts

such that folded years
are moved to edges
and brimmed over.

It seems then as if
I still move along
a memorized treeline
of missed hints
in unnumbered
darknesses.

Dogs with their teeth;

The world with its miles;

What was pressed by silence
from pathways
through the thick.

The backyard's stars
are the same stars,

no more tamed
by my collar,
my fire,
my furnace:

Nothing devised
could ever hope
to house their reflection.

The floor shakes that way
north of coffee,

and skylines
blur together.

It gets unsafe to move around,
even on your knees.

So I lay down -
spend that same night staring
at the face of what
has always stared back.

The Ring of the Bell

I have not named my panic.

That's why possibility
still crouches near embers

and faith yet mumbles
flint with steel
in pockets
on the old shoreline
near dawn.

Heading west,

I can still feel the steel
of the ring
of the bell
in my hands.

Still Don't, Never Will

I was raised up from an imaginary town
and jostled awake.

I was carried
in the ink
past unnamed rivers.

It happened under weary stars - all of it -
under comets
without names.

It sounds romantic:
years,
winters,
decades.

Firsts and seconds.

But it's just simple:

A cartographer's
lazy dream
of blue and red;
marbled terrain
spreading north
where the railroads thin.

I saw what I saw,
and I knew what I knew.

But I didn't see much,
and didn't know enough.

    Still don't. Never will.